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The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that.

Alfie Kohn

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Alfie Kohn
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: October 15
Author
Teacher
Writer
Miami Beach
Florida
Behaviorism
Legacy

More quotes by Alfie Kohn

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If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow.
Alfie Kohn
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Grades are a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation.
Alfie Kohn
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We have so much to cover and so little time to cover it. Howard Gardner refers to curriculum coverage as the single greatest enemy of understanding. Think instead about ideas to be discovered.
Alfie Kohn
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Independence is useful, but caring attitudes and behaviors shrivel up in a culture where each person is responsible only for himself.
Alfie Kohn
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If a child is off-task...mayb e the problem is not the child...maybe it's the task.
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Students should not only be trained to live in a democracy when they grow up they should have the chance to live in one today.
Alfie Kohn
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Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.
Alfie Kohn
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To control students is to force them to accommodate to a preestablished curriculum.
Alfie Kohn
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Punishments and rewards are two sides of the same coin and that coin doesn't buy you much.
Alfie Kohn
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Don't let anyone tell you that standardized tests are not accurate measures. The truth of the matter is they offer a remarkably precise method for gauging the size of the houses near the school where the test was administered.
Alfie Kohn
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Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
Alfie Kohn
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If I offered you a thousand dollars to take off your shoes, you'd very likely accept--and then I could triumphantly announce that 'rewards work.' But as with punishments, they can never help someone develop a *commitment* to a task or action, a reason to keep doing it when there's no longer a payoff.
Alfie Kohn
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Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.
Alfie Kohn
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Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children
Alfie Kohn
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Social psychology has found the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
Alfie Kohn
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In a word, learning is decontextualized. We break ideas down into tiny pieces that bear no relation to the whole. We give students a brick of information, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, until they are graduated, at which point we assume they have a house. What they have is a pile of bricks, and they don't have it for long.
Alfie Kohn
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Unconditional parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.
Alfie Kohn
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Being a team player should not imply a demand for simple obedience and conformity.
Alfie Kohn
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Grades dilute the pleasure that a student experiences on successfully completing a task.
Alfie Kohn
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The late W. Edwards Deming, guru of Quality management, once declared, 'The most important things we need to manage can't be measured.' If that’s true of what we need to manage, it should be even more obvious that it’s true of what we need to teach.
Alfie Kohn